Frieda Reiss

Eren's first dream of Frieda has him mistake her for Historia, so strong is the resemblance between the half-sisters. She stands tall, with a rounded face and smooth dark hair whose length shifts across her life: worn well past her shoulders in youth, cut to shoulder length before the ceremony in which she consumes her uncle, then grown back roughly halfway by the time she dies. Despite noble rank she favors simple dresses and skirts. Inheriting the Founding Titan changes her gaze, which swings between brightness and a dark vacancy, an outward trace of the world's memories and the First King's will inside her.

Her Founding Titan measures thirteen meters, feminine in build much like the Female Titan, with loose light hair at shoulder length, oversized eyes ringed by dark loops, a somewhat skeletal nose, and clearly defined musculature. The Pure Titan of her first transformation looks far frailer, bony and stocky, its elongated torso showing ribs and shoulder bones through the skin.

Warmth marks every account of Frieda that survives her. Villagers on the Reiss lands adore her for walking the fields and thanking the farmers personally, and she dotes on her half-sister Historia, teaching her to read, urging her toward kindness, and wiping the girl's memories after each visit to keep her safe. Courage runs through her as well; she apparently volunteers to inherit the Founding Titan, weeps through a succession that requires devouring her beloved uncle, and assures her father she will not surrender to their ancestors' ghosts.

The inheritance breaks something in her. Bound to the ideology of the First King, Karl Fritz, she sinks into depression, lurches between her gentle self and a harsher, aggressive one, and rants that all humans are sinners. Kenny Ackerman notices that the new queen speaks exactly as her predecessor Uri did, all peace and love for mankind, though whether she truly believes it or merely performs it never becomes clear. When Grisha Yeager begs her to end the Titan invasion, the vow leaves her unable to agree, and that refusal costs Frieda her life; even so, she fights him to the death defending her family.

Around age fifteen, Frieda learns that her uncle Uri, the sitting holder of the family's Founding Titan, is dying. Beneath the Reiss chapel she injects herself with Titan serum, transforms for the first time, and consumes his upper body, gaining the Titan along with the memories of the world from before the Walls. Royal blood grants her the Founder's complete abilities, what Rod calls an invincible power, including the manipulation of memories among the Subjects of Ymir, a gift she uses repeatedly on Historia. She becomes, in effect, humanity's living book, yet like every Reiss inheritor she falls under Karl Fritz's will and never shares what she knows.

Days after Wall Maria falls in 845, Grisha Yeager enters the chapel while the family gathers there. He pleads for the Founder's power to be turned against the invasion; Frieda wavers toward agreeing before the First King's will drags her back, and she counters that the people within the Walls must perish so that mankind beyond them can live. Grisha, revealing that the Attack Titan lets him glimpse a future in which he devours the Founder, transforms first. Inexperience decides the fight. Grisha defeats her Titan, eats her, and slaughters her mother and siblings, leaving Rod the sole survivor.

Her presence lingers through inherited memory. Eren, who gains her power secondhand after eating his father, dreams through her eyes; Historia gradually recovers the years Frieda erased. Rod tries to persuade Historia to devour Eren and bring Frieda's memories back to the family, a plan Historia rejects after recalling how the Founder hollowed her sister out. And in Kenny Ackerman's final moments, he remembers how Uri seemed to look out of Frieda's eyes from the first time he saw her speak.